Thursday, March 13, 2014

Run your Minecraft server in the cloud with CraftBukkit and BItnami

If you are a Minecraft player, you are in luck! We are happy to announce that CraftBukkit Minecraft server is now available on Bitnami! Yes, Minecraft is a bit of a departure for us, but the avid Minecraft gamers here were pining for it. Surely if we wanted it, at least one other gamer would....

CraftBukkit provides a modified Minecraft server that we've, in turn, used to make Minecraft available on Bitnami. You can download the Virtual Machine for VMware or VirtualBox or deploy your CraftBukkit Minecraft server in Amazon EC2 or Azure cloud platforms to have your own server and start playing Minecraft easily.

Minecraft player

If you use a cloud instance, you should open the 25565/TCP port in your firewall. You can find a quick guide to know how to connect your Minecraft client to the server here.

Bitnami CraftBukkit Minecraft server also contains a World Map that you can access from your browser directly.

CraftBukkit Minecraft server map

If you do not have an Amazon AWS account, you can play for free in a micro instance during one year thanks to the Amazon Free Usage Tier.

If you have a small group of players you can start with a micro instance but if your world start growing and you want to have more players, you can resize your instance to get the best performance. The Bitnami CraftBukkit Minecraft server options will be changed automatically to adapt your server to the instance type.

CraftBukkit server uses screen to run the server. You can run any command in the server easily, it is only necessary to start the "craftbukkit_console" script to log in the server screen session.

CraftBukkit Minecraft server console

Getting started with CraftBukkit Minecraft server in the cloud with Bitnami!

Could not make it run on AWS as is.I has to change the following:MCPATH from /opt/bitnami/apps/craftbukkit/server/ to /opt/bitnami/apps/craftbukkit/serverthen change the permissions on the " server" folder because the console could not start, I has a "cannot create bitnami_craftbukkit.pid" file error:chmod 775 server thenchmod g+s server (it seems that the PID file was being created with the wrong ownership)All working now.